The Penguin Blog

Two weeks, thirty-six stores and fifty-three elephants

Last year we endured countrywide flooding, cancelled trains and a swan that attacked our car on the banks of Lake Windermere – so it was with some trepidation that I embarked on this year’s tour with Gervase Phinn to promote the publication of the paperback of ‘The Heart of the Dales’.

This year, as well as signing at 36 bookstores, performing at 8 events, we ate rock in Blackpool, saw dozens of plastic sheep in Liverpool, then dozens more plastic elephants in Norwich. We got lost in midnight Leeds (that one way system…), scared away a fox in a Secret Garden at dusk (that tiny brown smudge at the back of the garden is the exiting fox), and had to contend with some fairly adverse weather conditions on the road once again. I even managed to get Gervase into Lancashire, which for a Yorkshireman still smarting about the War of the Roses, was no mean feat. It turns out the best thing to come out of Lancashire ISN’T the road to Yorkshire after all – it’s the extremely lovely booksellers and bookshops there. 

To say that I used Gervase’s time well is an understatement – the two week tour ranged across most of the length and breadth of the country, and Gervase signed at an average of 5 stores a day, followed by an event each evening. When I said goodbye to him yesterday at Exeter Station, I joked that I’d lied to him that this was the last day of the tour, and that in fact we had another 3 days of the tour to go.  It turns out that only one of us should be making the jokes – and he’s the one selling out venues across the country each year, rather than the one holding the lead balloon.

It’s always nerve racking in those 2 minutes before the scheduled signing, approaching the bookstore not really knowing how enthusiastically the bookshop has been promoting the event in advance of the author’s visit.  I won’t post mortem each signing and event – largely the signings were really well attended and really well promoted by the various wonderful booksellers at each store, but there’s always the inexplicable exceptions, where despite the hundreds of leaflets which have been picked up by enthusiastic book buyers, the posters everywhere, and the ads and author interviews going out in the local paper – you’ll get 4 people turning up with a large tumbleweed following along close behind. But these quieter ones were definite exceptions to the more general tour madness, and were in the most part linked to bad weather rather than a lack of enthusiasm by customers and/or booksellers. Sold out events and massive book sales in each evening venue testify to Gervase’s countrywide and long lasting general appeal. 

A further few specific comments about the tour: to the friendly waiter in Pocklington who was sure that he knew me – I’m afraid we lied to you – you don’t know me off Casualty and I have never been swathed from top to toe in bandages on the telly.  To Gervase and Barry – it turns out that Nobby Clark is also an accomplished musician as well as Morris Dancer, bell ringer, pub landlord and all round keen bean - who knew? And to the author sharing the stage with Gervase at one event, having read from his novel for 45 interminable minutes, and asked at 10pm ‘have I got time to read any more?’ – the answer is always going to be a resounding NO! Good lord…

The nice chart position in the top ten of last weekend’s bestseller lists is gratifying, and solidifies the raison d’etre for the 2 weeks away from home, however it’s meeting Gervase’s enthusiastic fans in every town that really makes it all worthwhile. Most people who meet Gervase tend to thank him for cheering them up; from the lady in Christchurch who had a brain haemorrhage last year and was kept going for many long weeks in hospital by listening to all the Dales audio books, to the woman in Derby who was pulled over by the police for suspected driving under the influence, but was in fact listening to Gervase and laughing so hard she was swerving all over the road. The policeman, it turned out, was also a fan, so let her off without charge.

Going on a book signing tour with an author is one of my main reasons for wanting to work in the publicity department of a company like Penguin.  It’s incredibly hard work, but ultimately rewarding and, when you’re on the road with someone like Gervase, full of helpless laughter. Note: Evil Knievel was NOT the guy riding that bike in ‘Rebel Without a Cause’.

Katya Shipster
Press Officer

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A word from an intern

After spending months polishing my CV, re-writing my cover letter and scanning the thesaurus for the most extravagant words that I could casually say during my interview for a place on the Pearson Diversity Internship, one would think that the week would begin smoothly. As I step onto the train wearing my Monday morning best, I glance at my fellow workers with a slight smile on my face, because I too have a destination to go to. But this tranquillity is quickly lost as I am pushed and then prodded by morning madams and busy businessmen running for their 8.50 a.m. train (despite the fact that work starts at 9 a.m.). This experience is enough to cause even the most tranquil individual to feel a little thrown off balance. Regardless of this, my first week as an intern within the Puffin Marketing and Publicity Team is fast becoming an interesting experience.

The creative flexibility that the team exercises is a trait that encourages even the most reclusive individual to speak out, be bold and share ideas. Since working on the team I have attended creative meetings where I have seen how marketing and publicity teams within publishing come up with creative and often unique promotional ideas. I have shared my ideas, worked extensively on the team’s online teenage website and helped promote new books, all in my first week!

But no other task has got my brain ticking more than my role working on Penguin’s latest venture, the Spinebreakers website. The site is an online community created by teens, for teens as a platform where they can share their love of reading and other creative mediums. The site showcases some of the most unique stories, poetry, songs and videos, all in an attempt to unite and encourage youths to read more and stand tall in their belief that reading is cool. I personally think such a site is much needed and is a breath of fresh air, especially when England has fast become a place for teen violence and crime, and using one’s imagination in a positive manner has now been replaced with the ease of picking a fight.

Spinebreakers is going offline at an up and coming road-show at the Roundhouse Studios in Chalk Farm, on the 25th of July. I have been fortunate enough to work on this event which will be inviting sixty teens to sign up and participate in three brilliant workshops which will include learning to use film equipment and creating a mini film on the day with Anton Saunders. There will be the opportunity to create a short story and receive practical tips on creative writing with journalist and Editor Emma Warren. There will also be the option to work with DJ and poet Charlie Dark who will inspire participants to transfer ideas from minds to paper and produce a soundtrack for a book. Music, food, drink (non-alcoholic of course!) and lots of creativity will be served up on a large platter throughout the day. This event is turning into one of the many highlights of my time at Penguin, because it will be a day when I will apply all my new skills.

So far, I can honestly say the internship is proving to be a good experience. If it is not the lure of the subsidised cafeteria, or the in-house ‘tea shop’ (as I like to call the kitchen), then it is the enjoyment of learning something new every day and gaining the opportunity to apply these skills to my work.

All of this and much more causes me to appreciate and soak up this experience.

Davelyn Thompson
Summer Intern

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Why we buy

There have been some interesting discussions at Penguin Towers about consumers' decision-making processes.

The fiction manager at Waterstones asked me a deceptively simple question: "Why do people buy more Penguin Classics than other publishers'? What is the customer decision-making tree?" I could talk about the qualities of the brand until I'm blue in the face, but what do people actually do in the shop? How do they decide that out of the 8 (count them!) editions of Pride and Prejudice on the shelf, that they are going to buy the black Penguin edition?

More generally, questions about why we make the decisions we do have been the subject of several key books including Paco Underhill's seminal Why We Buy -- based on research watching what people actually did in store, rather than what they said they did (these are not the same thing, so caveat marketeer). More recently, books on behavioural economics such as Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely offer plenty of food for thought for publishers and retailers.

Two of his arguments seem particularly relevant to me as I think about selling Classics:

1. Context is key.
(a) Give people too much choice and conversion from browsing to buying reduces (how many editions of P&P do we need on the shelves?).
(b) People find it difficult to judge the value of something in isolation. He tells the story of the first bread-maker on the market. It didn't sell until they introduced a second, bigger and more expensive model and positioned it in store next to it -- then the cheaper model flew off the shelves as customers had a context and could put a value to that product.

2. Imprinting habits. Once we start to buy something (say, coffee from Starbucks, or Classics by Penguin), it becomes much easier to do it again and again. It becomes a habit.

(Read more here.)

The implications for me include how to bring new readers to the Classics as well as reminding people of how much pleasure they have had from reading them and reminding them that more people buy/read Penguin Classics than any other brand, therefore appealing to what psychologists call the herding (hate that word) mentality. And here's the confessional part -- I love selling Classics, because I love Classics. I have never had a poor experience from choosing to read a Classic (wish I could say the same of every book I pick up). If I were selling cigarettes, or weapons, or Celine Dion CDs, I might feel more morally conflicted.

We've just bought the paperback rights to Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge which explores "choice architecture" and how to improve your decision-making and we'll publish in January (check out their blog). I'm quite seized by this as you can tell. I warn you, this won't be the last time you hear about this.

Fiona Buckland
Sales Manager

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Dialling Hamish Hamilton ... Please Hold

Hardback imprints are generally shy and retiring creatures, and certainly that’s the case at Penguin.  Perhaps it’s because of a certain bird with his perennially orange glow who persists in attracting attention (and taking the credit) with his easily recognisable high-street swagger.  Or perhaps it’s because hardback imprints are too busy quietly laying down the foundations of good literature – paving the way, that is, for the flightier paperbacks following in their wake.

But this month is a little bit different for us, and we – who happen to be the ones propping up the shy and retiring creature known as Hamish Hamilton – have decided to lay down our tools and position ourselves in the limelight.  And so I find myself addressing you all from the giddy heights of the internet and telling you about a brand-new little magazine called Five Dials.

Each month (or so) from now on we’ll bring you stories, dispatches, letters, pictures and short asides.  And we’ll be throwing hard covers to the wind and wrapping these handpicked goodies in nothing but a PDF.  For the first issue, go to www.fivedials.com.  And, if you’d like to partake of these pleasures monthly (and for free), just click on the Five Dials box at www.hamishhamilton.co.uk – a slightly bedraggled-looking website which is soon to be reincarnated in a leaner, meaner form – to tell us you’d like to invite us into your inbox on a regular basis.

Between these virtual outbursts we’ll be back running things on the ground, all the while exercising our collective brain on all manner of things bookish.  We’ll be pondering words, concocting covers, dreaming up blurbs.  So listen out for the thump-thump of our hardbacks – and the whoosh-whoosh of those flighty, glowing paperbacks following close behind.

Juliette - Associate Editor, Hamish Hamilton

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Saddling up old warhorses

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last summer it was decided to reissue Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy in a new look (above, design and illustration by Penguin's own Nathan Burton) that complemented her new book Life Class, also set during the First World War. The three books form a particularly pleasing tableau when lined up together (booksellers take note). The reissues were published on the 1st of May and, coincidently, eleven days later it was announced that The Ghost Road, the third title in the trilogy, which won the Booker Prize in 1995, had been short listed for the Best of Bookers.

The Best of Booker Prize is a curious event pitting past winners of the forty-year-old prize against one another: the old warhorses of yesteryear saddled up for one last battle. It works something like this. Forty-two winners (two years had joint winners) were read by a judging panel of three and whittled down to a short list of six, announced on May 12th. The winner will be announced on July 10th, decided by public vote via text or website.

Obviously, this Booker of Bookers is just a publicity exercise intended to get people talking about books and the state of literature as published in the UK, while reminding people of the cultural value of the Booker Prize. But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the process is somewhat flawed. If we leave aside the fact that comparing books is like comparing apples and apricots, we have the larger problem of the public vote. A judging panel is at least required to try and read all the eligible books. The public have no such obligation. So the votes for the short list will fall almost exclusively on those books voters are familiar with. In my case that is one book - which I forked out money for and sat down and read. Three others I have had cause to work on professionally.

It is therefore a popularity contest. Tony Blair might have called it the People's Booker.

In which case, you might ask, why not use book sales? The mass of people prepared to put their money down for a book are making a definitive statement - any book which didn't pass muster with joe public would swiftly find itself out of print (which has been the fate of at least one past Booker winner). William Hill have already put Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which won an earlier Best of the Booker contest in 1993, as favourite, while Barker's The Ghost Road is odds on second.

However, despite these flaws, the short list of the Best of Bookers, which stretches from 1973 to 1999 is one means of taking the cultural temperature of the country's readers. Is a book about the struggles of a nascent post-colonial nation more important to us than one detailing the crumbling mind of a soldier shattered by war? Does a story about a gamble for love in nineteenth-century Australia touch us more than one about the personal and cultural consequences of abusing a position of power in post-apartheid South Africa? Does a novel of nineteenth-century colonial arrogance in India beat one of twentieth-century colonial hypocrisy in South Africa? Perhaps issues don't make a winner and it is instead the artistry of the writer that will ensure the enduring appeal of a book. Most likely, it is some hard-to-put-your-finger-on mixture of both.

The book judged best in any given year will be viewed differently in subsequent years. It is a prize winner, but what keeps it relevant? What does its survival or non-survival say about it - and us? Reading any Booker Prize winner today will always be a different experience from reading it when it first came out. We as readers come to certain books at a remove from the context in which they were originally written and received. (There are reasons we don't see quite as much post-colonial fiction published these days and yet the short list we are offered is dominated by such books.)

The Booker of Bookers reminds us of the distance that separates us from the books of the past. But, I would argue, not so much through the books that have made the cut - but through those that haven't. What have we lost since then? What has become more or less important to us as readers?

So while we salute the short list we are given and, eventually, the public winner of the Booker of Bookers we will give ourselves, let us also raise a glass to the old warhorses - insert your choice from the list here - that haven't been saddled up and paraded before us.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.'

Not yet they aren't. But one of the most famous opening lines in modern English literature seems to me a good place to start writing about where to begin when reissuing an old book.

A friend of mine over at HarperCollins - in fact the wise chap that employed me here at Penguin a few years ago - had to hire a new copywriter a while back. He was looking for a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff and came up with the rather neat idea of inviting all applicants to supply the current blurb of a book they were fond of together with an entirely new blurb of their own devising. They then had to explain why theirs was better.

Improving on what has gone before in publishing is usually not so difficult since jackets tend to stay on books for many years and by the time publishers get around to reissuing them they look rather tired if not plain antediluvian. Here's an example, appropriately enough, from the Eighties:

 

The blurb on 1989's Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn't sound much like a novel at all:
Newspeak, Doublethink, Big Brother, the Thought Police – George Orwell's world-famous novel coined new and potent words of warning for us all. Alive with Swiftian wit and passion, it is one of the most brilliant satires on totalitarianism and the power-hungry ever written.

Maybe. But it sounds like a bit of a slog.

When it came to doing the reissue (out in July) it didn't take a lot of head scratching for me to decide that a) it was time I re-read one of my favourite books and b) the starting point for writing this blurb had to be the excellent opening line, which manages to be perfectly ordinary until its very last word - which rips the rug out from under your feet. Nice work, George.

By listing some of the words that Nineteen Eighty-Four had added to the English language, the old blurb was trying to get across the book's weight, its sheer importance. Unfortunately, as if with a lot of attempts to make things sound worthy, Nineteen Eighty-Four just comes across as dull. Something to be admired rather than liked.

I think we can do better than that.

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent – even in the mind. For those with original thoughts they invented Room 101 …

This edition is not the Penguin Modern Classics edition. This edition is the one we want to get into the hands of school kids, to grab their short attention spans. So yes, putting the key words - Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, Ministry of Truth - in there is important, but that is no reason to leave the story or the characters out. The great thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it is so unsettling, it is so terrifying and bleak (and not much fun as satire, either). To get that across we need to know what's at stake - what Big Brother is opposed to. We need Winston and Julia, their hopes and love, their humanity. Without Winston and Julia there is no tension, no story.

A book might be a classic, big names may rate it, teachers might tell you it is an essential read. But that's no reason not to sell it as if it's brand new - to some people it will be - or not to try to seduce the sceptical reader into turning to the first page despite themselves.

At the same time as Nineteen Eighty-Four we're reissuing Animal Farm:

Both books feature stunning covers by Shepard Fairey - if you're going to grab people, get them by the short and curlies. But don't let either cover art or blurbs distract you from the words within.

Any lazy or awful blurbs on good books you'd like to share with us? And can you do any better?

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

Nineteen Eighty-Four (ISBN: 978-0-141-03614-4) and Animal Farm (ISBN 978-0-141-03613-7) are re-issued on July 3rd.

Buy the pair on Amazon here.

PS I'm offering a pair of these Orwells to the first comment that correctly points out the (ahem) deliberate mistake I made on one of the new covers.

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Not the beginning of the end

This is going to sound like a terribly nice thing to say, but here it goes: I like working here. If you’ve got to get up, do battle with the London Underground, and sit somewhere all day, every day, I reckon Penguin’s a pretty good place to do it.

Still, when I first read Joshua Ferris’s outstanding satire on office life, Then We Came to the End, I couldn’t help laughing the laugh of recognition. There are two reasons for this: on one hand, you don’t have to hate your job to understand what it means to hate your job; and on the other, Ferris’ novel is not really about that. It’s a sophisticated, nuanced, and incredibly knowing look at what it’s like to have to spend most of your waking life surrounded by that most nebulous category of fellow human being: the colleague. It dramatizes with shocking accuracy the ways in which the office is at root a society in miniature, with all its attendant amicability, enmity and freakishness.

If you find such distinctions helpful (you may not), Then We Came to the End is probably what you’d call a “literary” novel (somewhere north, say, of middlebrow), and it’s remarkably heartening to see that it’s been given the support of the Richard and Judy Book Club.  What’s been interesting to watch is the way that since its inclusion on the R & J list, Then We Came to the End has really caught fire around Penguin. You might reasonably call it a “buzz” if that wasn’t the kind of word Ferris makes fun of in his book. However, before you start thinking that I’m stating the very bloody obvious, let me try to explain what I mean.

Since its acquisition in 2006 and its hardback publication in 2007, Then We Came to the End has been the object of much in-house love. Some of this, no doubt, can be chalked up to the book being written in the first person plural (“we”) and telling a kind of everyman story about people who, like us, work in offices. It also helped that the author is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. When the book was finally published to universal acclaim, we all had the little glow you get from being told that you’re right about something. It sold well for a hardback, but the numbers were still kind of modest. We had high hopes for the paperback, but again, because it’s a literary book we were curbing – if not our enthusiasm – then at least our expectations. Then something like R & J come along and makes everyone happy.

For starters, you’re chuffed because you know how many people are going to read and love this book. You imagine them on trains, and buses, and in armchairs and shop queues, laughing or nodding at all the right bits. Then you think what a difference this is going to make, financially, to a young author who lives in a small flat in Brooklyn. And finally, you remember something that’s worth being reminded of every so often: that there is still, despite all the things competing for people’s attention, a great, shark-like appetite for outstanding books. Having a book picked for the R & J list is wonderful news for a publisher, and it although to some it might feel a bit like a lottery, we can’t help feeling that anything to spread the message that, as Nick Hornby once put it, “books…are better than anything else", is a Very Good Thing indeed.

Jon Elek, Viking Assistant Editor

(Picture from Cubelife series by Philip Toledano)

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That was the year that was Pt 2

To round off the year we took the liberty of asking some Penguins for their bookish highlights of the year and their publishing resolutions for 2008 - second set of answers below. Of course if you have any highlights from the year just gone, or predictions for the year to come, let us know in the comments below.

What was your publication of the year?

Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright. Sometimes it's the story of struggling to do justice to a book that keeps it in mind. Larry Wright narrates the plot behind 9/11 with such pace and personality that he conveys an important truth: it is people--and the mistakes they make--who make history. The story of the CIA chief who raised the alarm on Al Qaeda in the 1990s and lost his job for his troubles and who ending up dying in the World Trade Center is just one thread in a masterfully woven tale which reads like a thriller. But we struggled to create the right jacket as 9/11 is a very difficult event to portray visually. Personally, I don't think there's any reason to show that terrible moment of impact ever again. It took time and we were up against a deadline, but I'm so proud of the final visual our brilliant art department created. It looks like a paperback you want to pick up and read, conveying drama, importance and readability. Available at all good bookshops because of it. (Fiona Buckland, Sales Manager, Penguin)

Penguin's Poems for Life - a book I commissioned and which has been something of a sleeper hit (in its small way!) this Christmas. Wonderful anthology, gorgeously produced. (Adam Freudenheim, Publishing Director, Penguin Classics)

Slam by Nick Hornby - we tried exciting new things in marketing terms to reach that hard to reach teenage audience (Joanna Prior, Communications Director, Penguin UK)

My favourite publication was The Islamist by Ed Husain, because we have seen Ed's life change dramatically following the book's publication, and because of the letters we receive from readers around the country, who see in Ed's writing what I saw when I first acquired it, and because everything, in publishing terms, went right. (Helen Conford, Publisher, Penguin Press)

Roger Deakin's WILDWOOD: a wonderful memorial to an amazing writer and man. (Tom Weldon, Managing Director, Penguin General)

Amillionpenguins.com - not exactly a publication, but one of the most exciting projects I have ever been involved with. Someone had to do it, and I'm glad it was us. (Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher)

What was your favourite book of 2007?

I had a bit of a Penelope Lively moment earlier in the year.  I liked her new book Consequences but even more I enjoyed her early, Booker Prize winning Moon Tiger. (JP)

My favourite book published in 2007 (in paperback!) was The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I've loved him since Blood Meridian.  My favourite book full stop was Dispatches by Michael Herr, partly no doubt because I read it while sitting on a deserted beach in Papua New Guinea. (HC)

Alistair Campbell's Diaries, an hilarious reminder that however far you advance in your career, you still fuck up constantly (TW)

Don Winslow's The Winter of Frankie Machine - a great american crime writer in top form. (JE)

What is your publishing resolution for 2008?

Publish every book with passion, enthusiasm and care. (AF)

Keep our retailers and their customers excited about Penguin books. And to sell even more (of course!) (FB)

To be brave, and to follow my gut instinct (HC)

Stay optimistic (TW)

To try and stay one step ahead of the game (je)

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That was the year that was Pt 1

To round off the year we took the liberty of asking some Penguins for their bookish highlights of the year and their publishing resolutions for 2008 - answers below and more coming tomorrow. Of course if you have any highlights from the year just gone, or predictions for the year to come, let us know in the comments below.

What was your publication of the year?

Don't really understand the question. I finally gave up the Indy for The Times if that's what you're asking!  (Tony Lacey, Editorial Director Viking)

Hurricane Gold by Charlie Higson (Robert Williams, Creative Director)

Neris & India's Idiot Proof Diet -- after all, I'll never publish another book that will make me lose 3 stone, nor another book that will have such an  incredible effect on so many women's lives.  Come to that this is the only diet book I'll ever publish… (Juliet Annan, Publishing Director Fig Tree)

My favourite publication of 2007 was Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence.  While I was reading I felt as if I could certainly run a middle-sized country's economy, and with a bit of help and a second reading could probably cope with a global economy.  Of course the feeling wore off after a bit - but it is a wonderfully entertaining and invigorating book. (Helen Fraser, Managing Director Penguin UK)

Roger Deakin's WILDWOOD: following his tragically early death it was wonderful to hear his voice on every page of this book. (Simon Prosser, Publishing Director Hamish Hamilton)

What was your favourite book of 2007?

From our own stable I very much enjoyed The Lodger though I skipped over the chapters on hair pieces; and I continue to browse Pardon My French - it's endlessly fascinating, just wish it was a bit longer. From outside, Sophie Hannah's terrific new book of poems; and James Lawton's ghosted "autobiography" of Bobby Charlton which makes you sigh for those pre-John Terry and Ashley Cole days. (TL)

Rupert Thomson's Death of a Murderer (RW)

Cormac Macathy's THE ROAD: an astonishing feat of stripped down prose and compressed emotion. (SP)

I can't limit it to one : EVERYMAN by Philip Roth; THE GOOD LIFE by Jay McInerney (recommended to me by one US and one UK Penguin) and Kate Atkinson's CASE HISTORIES: all books about death.  Oh dear. (JA)

My favourite book of 2007 was Zoe Heller's The Believers which I read in proof and thought was an incredible portrait of a massively dysfunctional family and a completely monstrous mother. (HF)

What is your publishing resolution for 2008?

Turn Ed Smith into a bestseller! (TL)

To give audiobooks a chance! (RW)

Try and find some books for the autumn ! (JA)

Do everything we can to help the independent bookshops. (SP)

My publishing resolution for 2008 is the same as it has been for many years: 'fewer better books'. (HF)

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Of bookstores in Australia

I arrived in Melbourne to news of arrests of terror suspects (in Australia), severe floods (in Australia) and the latest tour of Crowded House (only in Australia).  Indeed, the serious issues of the day seem broadly those of the UK: immigration; terror; global warming; Wimbledon; the balance in politics between the left and the right; Princess Diana's death; Iraq. 

 

What aren't that similar are the concerns of the publishing industry here and the publishing industry in the UK. One of the key reasons for this seems to be the state of the booktrade in Australia, where not only is there an incredibly strong independent bookselling culture accounting for 20% of the market (though also KMart, Target and Woolworths), but there is not yet a real internet retailer, aggressive discounting of books, or a culture in which any space in stores must be paid for. 

Now, how books is sold could be seen as quite unsexy: it involves warehouses, distribution, bulk discounting, negotiation on terms and placement in stores.  Yet the work of a publishing house is in the end, about placing the thoughts, arguments, stories of their authors in front of a reader, who buys the book, falls into it and (hopefully) then recommends it to others in turn, who can also find and buy it.  I've felt this week as though Australia has a booktrade where, though it obviously has its problems, it is easier to sell books with the passion that a publisher feels when it acquires an author's work in the first place.

 

And finally, my favourite fact of life in Melbourne: it has the highest-density population of Greeks outside of Athens.

 

Helen Conford

Editorial Director